Experimental philosophers have gathered impressive evidence for the surprising conclusion that philosophers' intuitions are out of step with those of the folk. As a result, many argue that philosophers' intuitions are unreliable. Focusing on the Knobe Effect, a leading finding of experimental philosophy, we defend traditional philosophy against this conclusion. Our key premise relies on experiments we conducted which indicate that judgments of the folk elicited under higher quality cognitive or epistemic conditions are more likely to resemble those of the (...) philosopher. We end by showing how our experimental findings can help us better understand the Knobe Effect. (shrink)

Sometimes two expressions in a discourse can be about the same thing in a way that makes that very fact evident to the participants. Consider, for example, 'he' and 'John' in 'John went to the store and he bought some milk'. Let us call this 'de jure' coreference. Other times, coreference is 'de facto' as with 'Mark Twain' and 'Samuel Clemens' in a sincere use of 'Mark Twain is not Samuel Clemens'. Here, agents can understand the speech without knowing that (...) the names refer to the same person. After surveying many available linguistic and pragmatic tools (intentions to corefer, presuppositions, meanings, indexing, discourse referents, binding etc.) I conclude that we must posit a new semantic primitive to account for de jure coreference. (shrink)

Many parts of the contemporary philosophical debate have been built on the radicalization of conclusions derived from the acceptance of a certain set of classical dichotomies. It also discusses how pragmatism and abduction are currently presented to solve the problems arising from these dichotomies. For this reason, the efforts of this article have been directed to analyze the impact of this fact on the philosophy of science and logic. The starting point is that accepting abduction implies, in many ways, accepting (...) the foundations of pragmatism. Also, that the analysis of such problems from pragmatism and the particular use of abduction dissolve the dichotomies and, with it, also modify the philosophical problems related to them. Therefore, I propose to understand abduction as the right conceptual device to review the problems and debates of the twentieth century’s epistemology from a pragmatic perspective. In doing so, the aim is to propose that the current use of abduction in contemporary debates may imply a change of the philosophical perspective. (shrink)

In this paper I survey some recent developments in experimental philosophy and discuss their bearing on two leading theories in epistemology: Contextualism and Interest Relative Invariantism. In the first part of the paper, I survey some general issues of how experimental philosophy may be relevant to assessing contextualism and IRI. In the second part, I discuss and critique some of the recent experimental work.

People generally accept that there is causation by omission—that the omission of some events cause some related events. But this acceptance elicits the selection problem, or the difficulty of explaining the selection of a particular omissive cause or class of causes from the causal conditions. Some theorists contend that dependence theories of causation cannot resolve this problem. In this paper, we argue that the appeal to norms adequately resolves the selection problem for dependence theories, and we provide novel experimental evidence (...) for it. (shrink)

People’s causal judgments are susceptible to the action effect, whereby they judge actions to be more causal than inactions. We offer a new explanation for this effect, the counterfactual explanation: people judge actions to be more causal than inactions because they are more inclined to consider the counterfactual alternatives to actions than to consider counterfactual alternatives to inactions. Experiment 1a conceptually replicates the original action effect for causal judgments. Experiment 1b confirms a novel prediction of the new explanation, the reverse (...) action effect, in which people judge inactions to be more causal than actions in overdetermination cases. Experiment 2 directly compares the two effects in joint-causation and overdetermination scenarios and conceptually replicates them with new scenarios. Taken together, these studies provide support for the new counterfactual explanation for the action effect in causal judgment. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose and defend a pair of necessary conditions on evidence-based knowledge which bear resemblance to the troubled sensitivity principles defended in the philosophical literature. We can think of the traditional principles as simple but inaccurate approximations of the new proposals. Insofar as the old principles are intuitive and used in scientific and philosophical contexts, but are plausibly false, there’s a real need to develop precise and correct formulations. These new renditions turned out to be more cautious, (...) so they won’t be able to do everything the old principled promised they could. For example, they respect closure for knowledge. But these sober formulations, or something like them, might be the best that we can do with respect to sensitivity. And there’s value in understanding the limits to these types of principles. (shrink)

One of the central debates in the philosophy of language is that between defenders of the causal-historical and descriptivist theories of reference. Most philosophers involved in the debate support one or the other of the theories. Building on recent experimental work in semantics, we argue that there is a sense in which both theories are correct. In particular, we defend the view that natural kind terms can sometimes take on a causal-historical reading and at other times take on a descriptivist (...) reading. The meaning will shift depending on the conversational setting. The theoretical view has roots in work by Kitcher. We present some original experiments that support the thesis. (shrink)

I argue that truth is relative (in the sense recently defended by some prominent analytical philosophers) by focusing on some semantic issues raised by Einstein's theory of relativity together with our ordinary attributions of truth.

Recently, some philosophers have defended the idea that knowledge is an interest-relative notion. According to this thesis, whether an agent knows P may depend on the practical costs of her being wrong about P. This perspective marks a radical departure from traditional accounts that take knowledge to be a purely intellectual concept. I think there is much to say on behalf of the interest-relative notion. In this paper, I report on some new evidence which strongly suggests that ordinary people’s attributions (...) of knowledge are in fact sensitive to practical interests. This is noteworthy because recent experiments have been interpreted by many to support the opposite conclusion. I also argue that the new results support an invariantist but interest-relativist account of knowledge, a thesis known as Interest Relative Invariantism (IRI). I do not make the case here that IRI gives us the very best explanation of the results presented here. Any such attempt would require an in-depth survey of the last few decades of work in epistemology. I only want to argue here that IRI gives us a simple and elegant explanation of the new data, and that the same cannot be said about traditional contextualism, a leading competitor to IRI. (shrink)

What role does language play in the process of building worldviews? To address this question, in the first section of this paper we will clarify what we mean by worldviews and how they differ, in our perspective, from cosmovisions. In a nutshell, we define worldviews as the biological interpretations agents create of the world around them and cosmovision the more general cultural-based reflections on it. After presenting our definition for worldview, we will also present the multi-shaped viewpoint that frames our (...) analysis, adopting three concepts that can help us explain how agents construct and develop their worldviews: saliences, pregnances, and abduction. While the notions of saliences and pregnances will explain how agents recognize anomalies in their worldview, the concept of abduction will help us discuss how they can learn to approach, explain, and use these anomalies to get new skills and abilities. This other point will lead us to discuss the role of language in this process, which will be describe as an artifact that permits the agent to use abduction to “normalize” and exploit anomalies, being now the ultimate artifact to build, develop, and update their worldviews. (shrink)

Suppose that we repair a wooden ship by replacing its planks one by one with new ones while at the same time reconstructing it using the discarded planks. Some defenders of vague or indeterminate identity claim that: (1) although the reconstructed ship is distinct from the repaired ship, it is indeterminate whether the original ship is the reconstructed ship and indeterminate whether it is the repaired ship, and (2) the indeterminacy is due to the world and not just an imprecision (...) in the language used to describe the situation. I argue that such a description is incoherent. The argument has two features. First, it differs in spirit from Gareth Evans's more general famous proof against the possibility of indeterminate identity. This is because I rely on facts regarding counting and sets. Second, I focus on Terence Parsons's recent defence of indeterminate identity. I argue that his attempts at making sense of counting objects involving indeterminate identities fail on technical and philosophical grounds. (shrink)

Do you know you are not being massively deceived by an evil demon? That is a familiar skeptical challenge. Less familiar is this question: How do you have a conception of knowledge on which the evil demon constitutes a prima facie challenge? Recently several philosophers have suggested that our responses to skeptical scenarios can be explained in terms of heuristics and biases. We offer an alternative explanation, based in learning theory. We argue that, given the evidence available to the learner, (...) it would be rational for the learner to infer an infallibilist conception of knowledge. (shrink)

I develop a cognitive account of how humans make skeptical judgments (of the form “X does not know p”). In my view, these judgments are produced by a special purpose metacognitive "skeptical" mechanism which monitors our reasoning for hasty or overly risky assumptions. I argue that this mechanism is modular and shaped by natural selection. The explanation for why the mechanism is adaptive essentially relies on an internalized principle connecting knowledge and action, a principle central to pragmatic encroachment theories. I (...) end the paper by sketching how we can use the account I develop here to respond to the skeptic. (shrink)

We propose a Bayesian framework for the attribution of knowledge, and apply this framework to generate novel predictions about knowledge attribution for different types of “Gettier cases”, in which an agent is led to a justified true belief yet has made erroneous assumptions. We tested these predictions using a paradigm based on semantic integration. We coded the frequencies with which participants falsely recalled the word “thought” as “knew” (or a near synonym), yielding an implicit measure of conceptual activation. Our experiments (...) confirmed the predictions of our Bayesian account of knowledge attribution across three experiments. We found that Gettier cases due to counterfeit objects were not treated as knowledge (Experiment 1), but those due to intentionally-replaced evidence were (Experiment 2). Our findings are not well explained by an alternative account focused only on luck, because accidentally-replaced evidence activated the knowledge concept more strongly than did similar false belief cases (Experiment 3). We observed a consistent pattern of results across a number of different vignettes that varied the quality and type of evidence available to agents, the relative stakes involved, and surface details of content. Accordingly, the present findings establish basic phenomena surrounding people’s knowledge attributions in Gettier cases, and provide explanations of these phenomena within a Bayesian framework. (shrink)

Following Kit Fine (2007), we can say that the de jure pair represent the referent as the same while the second one does not do so. There are roughly three ways of capturing this difference. One could say that de jure coreference between two expression occurrences happen because (a) the occurrences have identical meanings, (b) they have identical syntactic properties, or (c) they enter into a semantic relation not grounded in identity of meaning or syntax. In what follows, I give (...) some reason to think that de jure coreference is not a transitive relation. As a consequence, we can rule out (a) and (b) just on these grounds alone (since identity is a transitive relation). (c) then looks promising. I argue that this gives further support for a relationist semantics along the lines of what Kit Fine has proposed. (shrink)

I argue in favor of a certain connection between knowledge and the permissibility of action. On this approach, we do not think of the relation between those notions as reflecting a universal epistemic principle. Instead, we think of it as something resembling a platitude from folk psychology. With the help of some elementary tools from the logic of normativity and counterfactuals, I attempt to establish the connection by deriving it from more elementary principles. The new formulation involves a ceteris paribus (...) clause. Though it is often difficult to specify the exact content of a ceteris paribus clause, we will see that our clause is derived from a descriptive generalization with independent motivation. (shrink)

Sensitivity-type principles are prominent in epistemology. They have the promise to explain our intuitive and considered reactions to a wide range of important cases in everyday life, science and philosophy. Despite this promise, philosophers have raised a number of very serious objections to the principles. Accordingly, I propose a different type of sensitivity account which, I believe, gets around these serious objections. An important feature of the new approach is that the principle I propose need not be true. Rather, it (...) should be understood as a cognitive heuristic that tells us when something is not known—a type of doubt. A second feature is that the principle does not care about what one’s belief would be like in counter-factual situations. Instead, it cares about what the bases or causes for the belief would be like in those situations. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Philosophers have been talking about skepticism for a long time. Some of those insights can shed light on our public discourse regarding climate change.

I consider here the issue of whether and to what extent moral truths are absolute. My aim is to raise some new considerations in favor of moral relativism: the thesis that some moral statements can vary in truth-value depending on the moral standards at issue.1 2 This paper has three major components. First, I describe a new puzzle concerning the possibility of moral knowledge in light of expert disagreement. I argue that the best solution to this puzzle requires moral relativism. (...) Second, I develop a notion of a moral standard that incorporates recent developments in moral psychology, including work by.. (shrink)

In A Puzzle About Belief, Saul Kripke tells the story of a person caught in a classic Frege case. Peter is unaware that Paderewski the famous Polish politician, and Paderewski the famous Polish musician, are one and the same person. What is supposed to distinguish this Frege case from many others is that Peter associates a single name, 'Paderewski' with both of his conceptions. But not everyone may agree with this description. Richard Larson and Peter Ludlow, and Robert Fiengo and (...) Robert May have suggested that Peter's idiolect contains two 'Paderewski' names (or syntactic expressions). Just as ordinary English speakers may have two 'bank' words each with its own meaning, Peter has two homophonic names each corresponding to one of his conceptions of Paderewski. I will call this position, which will be subject to further clarification, 'the two-name view'. According to the two-name view, the syntactic facts concerning an agent's language should reflect, in this peculiar way, her own perspective on the world. In this sense then, the two-name view is a symptom of an individualistic conception of the words that make up a person's language. (shrink)

I consider two possible sources of vagueness. The first is indeterminacy about which intension is expressed by a word. The second is indeterminacy about which referent (extension) is determined by an intension. Focusing on a Fregean account of intensions, I argue that whichever account is right will matter to whether vagueness turns out to be a representational phenomenon (as opposed to being “in the world”). In addition, it will also matter to whether supervaluationism is a viable semantic framework. Based on (...) these considerations, I end by developing an argument against supervaluational semantics that depends, instead, on anti-Fregean (Millian) assumptions. (shrink)

A passenger boards a fast train. It takes her some distance, makes a u-turn, and returns to the starting platform. She reports that according to her clock, the trip took n seconds. An observer on the platform, using his own clock, gets a different reading. He records a longer time interval m. These claims are compatible with the clocks being in perfect order. Modern Physics tells us that time is a relativistic notion. The duration of the trip, understood as the (...) temporal distance between the departure and the return event, will depend on the chosen frame of reference. The passenger and the observer belong to different frames. This is the source of the discrepancy. Suppose that the passenger and the observer speak a language that is like ours with possible differences arising from the assumption that no one in their community knows about modern physics. Let us call this language '19th Century English'. Imagine that the agents, in different conversations, utter sentences (1) and (2) respectively. (shrink)

How does a sign manage to represent an object? This is one of the central questions of philosophy. I want to ask a related question. How is it that several signs can represent the very same object? It is tempting to think there is little to this question beyond what can be said about the first. But things are not so simple. A pair of representations can denote the same object in a special way. For some anaphora-antecedent pairs or for (...) some occurrences of the same word, the signs corefer in a way that makes that very fact evident. In this sense, we may say that sometimes the relation of coreference is “de jure”. I begin the paper by outlining what I think are the three core properties of de jure coreference. This reveals that the phenomenon is genuine, ubiquitous and requires explanation. Next, I argue that the relation is not transitive. What this means is that just about every possible explanation is ruled out. For example, we can’t say that two signs are de jure coreferential because they mean the same thing, they are expressions of the same symbol or they correspond to the same variable, index or discourse referent. I do not pursue a solution here. (shrink)

Este escrito es un esfuerzo investigativo de corte crítico que se mueve argumentativamente entre paradojas, en el que se describe una tendencia actual en la sociedad como patológica y deshumanizante. A tal tendencia le hemos llamado sedentarismo-nómada, primera paradoja, que no es más que la tendencia del hombre a ser sedentario de un lugar u objeto tecnológico de moda, mientras que está en la posibilidad de conocer el mundo mediante tal objeto, haciendo un clic, sin salir de su casa o (...) lugar de trabajo, pero al mismo tiempo viajando por todo el mundo. Tendencia que se da entre actores sociales caracterizados como singularidades-plurales-narrativas, segunda paradoja, que a su vez obedece a una política de la homogenización, un proceso de estandarización social en masa; una ética comerciante, un proceso de regulación y caracterización comportamental bajo la lógica del mercado en la instauración de una nueva forma de relacionarse con la vida, con el sí mismo y con el otro, una relación mercantil; como expresiones de una cultura pornográfica audio-visual, el otro hecho objeto de consumo; y una pedagogía del consumo, una cultura que educa por y para comprar y vender a través de objetos tecnológicos. La consideración de un mundo trágico y sin sentido pero al que, hay que hallarle razón de ser, es la última de las paradojas. Radiografía social que deja al hombre transformado en la única cosa que puede ser institucionalmente, mercancía de consumo, objeto prostituido. (shrink)